Most of what we know or assume to know is wrong one way or another.
When I was asked by Pacific Comics for an original creator-owned series, my first choice of those several characters was Ms. Mystic. Since I always try to advance the work of other younger creators, I asked the young Mike Nasser if he'd like to join me in this project. He said yes. Mike created nothing!
Back in the olden days when we were rubbing sticks together, everybody wanted to have a comic strip, to live in Westport Connecticut, to have a Jaguar and to have a wife and two and a half kids and to have a girl in town in their studio in Manhattan that they'd romance, and then they'd have people ghost their strip. It was like this big dream.
Not too many people draw black people as well as I do.
People are different from one another. That's what makes the world good. That's what makes the world great.
As far as I know, no kid ever bought a children's book himself with his own money, but they'll buy comic books. So we better make them good.
The fights that I had with DC and Marvel, I won. And guess what? They profited by it.
Every business makes big mistakes along the way.
I created the first black superhero who was not a gangbanger or an African chief but was rather a college graduate and a professional, which I think is a big accomplishment.
Times have changed. And as the audience changes, so do the superheroes.
Of all the mutants on Earth, Professor X could easily pass as a human.
Neal has a good time all the time. It's really nice to be Neal Adams.
I did work more realistically: I used real anatomy, faces with expressions - not Dick Tracy with his one slip of the mouth and that's it, but actual expressions on the faces that made the characters look like they were saying what was in the balloons.
What's happened is that every time I go to a convention or go into a comic book shop is that people drag me off into a corner and beat me up and go, 'When are you going to do Batman again?'
My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They're meant to be novels.
One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me 'icon,' I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover - but while I'm doing it, there is going to be an idea there.
I have always felt that effect covers are very good covers. They bring you into the story if you pay attention to them.
I used to work on a carousel on a boardwalk in Coney Island.
The 'Superman vs. Muhammad Ali' book was printed in every free country in the world, OK? Now, it's so good in its way that we can go in and make fun of it and feel good about it.
You could say everybody's a fan of Jack Kirby. I would say I'm a fan of Jack Kirby. I'm a fan of Jack Kirby the man.
